Sensuous slurp

Having failed for the second year to do anything more than speculate idly about attending the annual Wellfleet Oyster Fest, my friend Josh and I decided to stage our own oyster gorge on the same weekend without having to drive to Cape Cod.

This afternoon — a perfect, crisp fall day, bright blue and breezy and not quite 60 degrees — found us in the backyard with 36 oysters, a dozen apiece of giant bluepoint (said to be the favorite of Queen Victoria), medium-size, oblong malpeque and the small, deeply cupped kusshi. (Someone who orders in abundance hooked us up with the bounty.) For sauces we brought horseradishy cocktail and mellow remoulade, but both might as well not have existed, given how good the shallot-apple mignonette was was. On the side: beer and stellar aged provolone, spicy calabrese hard sausage and oven-fresh bread from Cardona’s Market in Albany.

I hadn’t shucked oysters in years and Josh had never done it, but we learned quickly, even using an $8 clam knife, having run screaming from the Williams-Sonoma store in Crossgates and its $40 oyster knife.

The kusshi oysters, tiny and with a mineral bite, popped open with ease, their deep cups retaining abudant liquor. The longer, thin malpeques were a little trickier and had a tendency to break, meaning some of the precious brine spilled, but I found them sweeter, a little fuller in texture and wholly satisfying. The bluepoints were both better and worse and significantly harder to open (and muddier inside, too.) Some gushed liquid; others were merely moist. All were significant in size, almost as big as scallop shells, and one in particular truly needed such a large shell: The meat itself was as long as a middle finger and more than twice as wide. (It’s what Josh is wrangling above and at right.)

In barely more than an hour we opened and slurped down the oysters, swigged through a six-pack and left behind just a couple of heels of bread. Spectacular. Oysters should be consumed in abundance; a half-dozen on a plate of crushed ice is just a tease. And yet, alas, the only more extravagant oyster experience I’ve had was a couple of years back, when two of us sat at the counter at the famed Oyster Bar in New York’s Grand Central Station and ordered one apiece of every kind of oyster they had in stock that day. There were 30.